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January 25, 2010
The emergence of this site on Flickr has caused me to dig around looking for ex-pat NZ photographers now living in Australia to build on my earlier posts of those Christchurch-based who are serious about their art photography.
In the process I came across Doc Ross, who lives in Christchurch New Zealand, and works predominantly in the South Island, with regular trips around the world. His work is a mixture of still life's, abstract details and landscapes and it is analogue based with an emphasis on the fine print. I find this work intriguing: an abstraction from few small rocks shot in his studio on a winters day:
Doc Ross 11th Sept 2001,
This is classic photographic modernism concerned the beauty of form that refers back to the black and white work of Edward Weston' still life studies (peppers) and beachscapes.
Ross says that he has been influenced by Bill Henson and Hiroshi Sugimoto, suggesting that the vitality of the Romantic tradition in New Zealand in a visual culture rather than just a literary culture.
This tradition, which has its roots in the romantic interpretation of nature in England (Constable and Turner) is broader than wilderness landscape photography. It is one that transgresses the isolation of the artist, the insistence on the primacy of an intuitive inspiration, listens only to his own inner voice, is constantly in opposition to a society which resents him and is also a prophet, ‘an unacknowledged legislator of mankind’.
It is a tradition that interprets nature differently from the picturesque approach, as it emphasizes wildness, sublimity, atmospheric effects and a receptive feeling for the atmosphere and mood of the place.
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Do you know the work of Matheson Beaumont? He has been photographing the landscape of the South Island of New Zealand for the last forty years.